IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v47y1998i10p1547-1554.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Risk and the general practitioner budget holder

Author

Listed:
  • Martin, Stephen
  • Rice, Nigel
  • Smith, Peter C.

Abstract

For most individuals, the use made of health care in a given year is determined principally by unpredictable random incidents. Of course, some individuals have a predictably higher predisposition to illness than others. However, the general consensus is that only a fraction of individual variability in health care costs can be predicted. The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of this inherent randomness for setting health care budgets for general practitioner purchasers of health care. The paper argues that variability in utilization in health care is very high; that no capitation formula can ever completely capture that variability, even for large populations; that the variability may give rise to certain dysfunctional consequences if not managed carefully; and that therefore careful attention should be given to the managerial arrangements associated with any devolution of health care budgets.

Suggested Citation

  • Martin, Stephen & Rice, Nigel & Smith, Peter C., 1998. "Risk and the general practitioner budget holder," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 47(10), pages 1547-1554, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:47:y:1998:i:10:p:1547-1554
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(98)00231-7
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Adam Oliver, 1999. "Risk Adjusting Health Care Resource Allocations," Monograph 000452, Office of Health Economics.
    2. Trevor A. Sheldon & Peter C. Smith, 2000. "Equity in the allocation of health care resources," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 9(7), pages 571-574, October.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:47:y:1998:i:10:p:1547-1554. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.